Berlin, January 2024 – YPOG advised early-stage investor 42CAP on the €28 million Series A financing round of artificial intelligence start-up Qdrant. Lead investor in the round was Spark Capital, with US venture capitalist Unusual Ventures also participating.
Qdrant was founded in Berlin in October 2021 by Andre Zayarni and Andrey Vasnetsov. The AI start-up is developing a high-performance, scalable, open-source vector database and search engine that is essential for developing the next generation of Artificial Intelligence /Metric Learning applications. Qdrant can process billions of vectors and supports the matching of semantically complex objects. This enables complex data such as images, audio tracks and videos to be organized.
The company intends to use the newly raised capital to expand its vector database and improve scalability and efficiency for next-generation AI use cases.
The team led by Frederik Gärtner already advised 42CAP on the €2 million pre-seed financing round of Qdrant in 2022 and the €7.5 million seed financing round in April 2023.
Team
Dr. Frederik Gärtner (Lead, Transactions), Partner, Berlin
Dr. Benedikt Flöter (AI/IP/IT), Associated Partner, Berlin
Alexander Sekunde (Transactions), Senior Associate, Berlin
About 42CAP
42CAP is a pan-European investor team participating in early-stage companies with global ambitions in the B2B technology sector. The founders and partners are former successful founders themselves who have made companies big, in some cases over decades. The founding investors Alex Meyer and Thomas Wilke built up one of the largest European SaaS companies with eCircle and sold the profitable company to Teradata (NYSE:TDC) in 2012. Moritz Zimmermann made the software company Hybris big before it was absorbed into SAP. Under the "Credo Peers among Entrepreneurs", they support industry and product-oriented founders, extremely data-driven business models and sustainable corporate development. This background is appreciated by founders such as Nicolas Reboud (SHINE, Paris), Kristjan Vilosius (Katana, Tallinn) and Alexander Igelsböck (Adverity, Vienna).
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